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Common Law and Aesthetic Dissent: Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Pragmatism, and the Jurisprudence of Agon by Allen Porter Mendenhall A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty of Auburn University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Auburn, Alabama August 1, 2015 Keywords: Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., Pragmatism, Dissent Copyright 2015 by Allen Porter Mendenhall Approved by Marc Silverstein, Chair, Professor of English James Emmett Ryan, Professor of English Kelly Kennington, Assistant Professor of History Abstract This dissertation investigates Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.’s dissents that instantiate his evolutionary view of the common-law system. The style and rhetoric of his dissents drew attention to his legal propositions that undermined the law as established by the majority; in so doing, Holmes ensured that the oppositional legal proposition was retained in the legal canon so that it would be available for future judges and justices to consider and possibly vindicate. Holmes thereby guaranteed that the legal system had, in his own words, some “play in the joints” and remained flexible in order to adapt to changes in culture and technology. I examine some of Holmes’s dissents for their aesthetic and rhetorical properties to show that those properties contributed to the canonization of his writings and the vindication of his arguments. I use Richard Poirier’s notion of superfluity and linguistic skepticism, which he attributes to Holmes’s mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Jonathan Levin’s notion of the poetics of transition to the genre of dissent. These theories of Poirier and Levin are about overcoming stasis and ensuring creative progress—something that is central to Holmes’s view of an evolutionary common law in which rules must change and adapt. I consider how Holmes’s canonical dissents, especially those regarding freedom of speech and expression, suggest that his model for the common law is also a pragmatic model for the way in which society can adjust effectively to change and to divided opinions among the populace. ii Table of Contents Abstract ......................................................................................................................................... ii List of Tables ................................................................................................................................ v Introduction ................................................................................................................................. 1 The Great Dissenter ........................................................................................................ 3 The Evolutionary Paradigm of the Common Law .......................................................... 5 Varieties of Emerson ..................................................................................................... 12 Against the Static Common Law .................................................................................. 21 Chapter 1 ................................................................................................................................... 28 Holmes and Dissent: Data ............................................................................................. 32 Holmes’s Style .............................................................................................................. 46 Emersonian Superfluity ................................................................................................ 61 Conclusion .................................................................................................................... 71 Chapter 2 ................................................................................................................................... 74 Poetics of Transition ..................................................................................................... 76 Conclusion .................................................................................................................. 114 Chapter 3 ................................................................................................................................. 118 Holmes as “Prophet” ................................................................................................... 124 Canon and Anti-Canon ............................................................................................... 131 Judicial Aesthetics ...................................................................................................... 139 iii Vindication and the Marketplace of Ideas .................................................................. 142 Bettabilitarianism and Civilization ............................................................................. 150 Conclusion .................................................................................................................. 157 Conclusion .............................................................................................................................. 161 Transition and Reproduction ....................................................................................... 171 Integrating Holmes with Peirce, Dewey, and James ................................................... 179 Works Cited ............................................................................................................................ 205 Appendix A ............................................................................................................................. 236 Endnotes .................................................................................................................................. 261 iv List of Tables Table 1 .................................................................................................................................. 34-37 Table 2 .................................................................................................................................. 41-42 Table 3 .................................................................................................................................. 42-43 Table 4 .................................................................................................................................. 43-44 Table 5 ....................................................................................................................................... 44 v INTRODUCTION Holmes and the Evolutionary Paradigm for the Common Law This dissertation investigates the dissents of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., to understand how they instantiate his evolutionary view of the common-law system. Influenced by Darwinian science and by the classical pragmatism of C.S. Peirce, William James, and John Dewey, Holmes forged a paradigm for the common law in which legal principles progressed through constructive competition and through the selective elimination of unfit theories and practices. He rejected any formulation of the law as static and unchanging. My argument is that the style and rhetoric of his dissents drew attention to his legal propositions that undermined the law as memorialized by the majority position. In so doing, Holmes ensured that the oppositional proposition was retained in the legal canon so that it would be available for future judges and justices to consider and possibly to vindicate. Holmes thereby guaranteed that the legal system had some “play in its joints” (Bain Peanut Co. of Tex. v. Pinson 501) and remained flexible to adapt to changes in culture and technology. Dissenting opinions are by nature agonistic; they compete with majority opinions, push back against established precedents, multiply the range of judicial options, and diversify the franchise in legal theory. Their oppositional nature and function make them productive sites for aesthetic and theoretical experimentation. Richard Poirier and Jonathan Levin, drawing from Harold Bloom, have proposed that pragmatists in the Emersonian lineage developed their own dissenting tradition by struggling against the anxiety of influence and linguistic skepticism to produce original and lasting aesthetics. This pragmatic tradition illuminates the practice of judicial dissent in the American common-law context by showing that both law and aesthetics depend upon agon and variation to facilitate constructive change. 1 Poirier and Levin suggest that agonistic struggles maximized the Emersonian pragmatists’ creative energies and generated a superfluous aesthetic that enacted the poetics of transition by influencing future writers in the same tradition. Holmes is part of this tradition. Emerson was his mentor. Holmes was a member of the Metaphysical Club who adopted his own type of pragmatism compatible with common-law jurisprudence. He struggled not only against the anxiety of influence and linguistic skepticism but also against majority positions and the doctrine of stare decisis. Studying Holmes’s dissents shows that the problem of linguistic skepticism that stimulated the originality of the Emersonian pragmatists operates comparably in the legal context in which utterances constitute rules that guide social activity. By dissenting with a style that demanded attention, Holmes struggled against the textual and institutional limitations that were also the sources of his ingenuity. He availed himself of superfluity to unsettle majority positions and to enable a constructive vagueness in the law that future judges and justices were forced